


Falling Pains

by TerresDeBrume



Series: AUs without a cause [54]
Category: Supernatural, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-20 03:40:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10654146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: Angels don’t get burns, but Derek does.





	Falling Pains

**Author's Note:**

> According to the file’s name, this was first drafted in 2012, when I was still actively into SPN and Teen Wolf…I figured being on holidays and wanting to post something were excellent reasons to clean it up and publish it :P

Well, the whole story probably starts when Sam Winchester jumps into Hell and every angel in Heaven is stuck between a) join the fratricide party of b) try and get away from it all...but the small story, their little part in this giant mess, starts when Stiles finds Derek in the kitchenette of their latest motel room, staring at his thumb like it just said something particularly offensive.

 

Picture this: it’s ass o’clock in the morning, and Stiles has three brand new sets of sutures, one giant bruise for a back, and the nagging impression that there is still selkie gunk on his skin, despite all evidence to the contrary. Meanwhile, Derek is looking at a perfectly ordinary part of his body like it just grew out of him at random, which was sort of understandable at the beginning, but it’s been over six months now, and Stiles has used up all the patience he had for that problem.

 

Which is probably why he sounds less than friendly when he asks:

 

 

“What’s the matter this time?”

“I accidentally touched the radiator,” Derek says without taking his eyes off his thumb, like it’s going to run if left unattended. “It was unpleasant.”

“Oh, that!” Stiles shrugs, relieved at how easy the whole thing turns out to be, “it’s just a burn dude. Don’t sweat it.”

 

 

It doesn’t hit him until later—when he’s back on the road with Isaac and Derek is doing whatever he does when he’s not camping out in the back of the jeep—that angels don’t get burns.

 

 

{ooo}

 

 

Isaac is understandably touchy about vampire hunts, so it takes a while before Stiles can start paying proper attention to Derek again—the fact that the angel spends most of his time away, on ‘research’ that leaves touristic brochures scattered on Stiles’ upholstery, doesn’t help either—but eventually, he sees the signs.

 

He catches Derek staring at a cut on his fingers after Isaac tears a sheet of paper out of his hand. He watches him sniff at his t-shirt in the rearview mirror, until Isaac tells Derek he needs to change and, well, Stiles kind of has to agree—the guy is starting to smell. There’s the time Derek gets sunburns all over his face—there’s a pale line on his temple, where his sunglasses go, it’s really ridiculous—and the one week where he keeps poking at a bruise on his right shin.

 

Derek is changing.

 

It’s not the same as Isaac, Stiles is pretty sure, though he didn’t know the guy yet. It’s definitely not like Scott, either, who went to bed with a fever and a nasty dog bite and woke up with three bullets in his chest from where Stiles shot him with his father’s gun, the Sheriff’s blood dripping from a familiar, oddly uneven smile.

This thing—whatever is happening with Derek—is slower, more gradual. It doesn’t jump at Stiles’ throat in the morning and it doesn’t get him thrown across the room when blood-thirst gets too much, which is just as well because Isaac does his best but that entire move just sucks, alright? The whole thing just creeps up on them, slow pace and lazy gait, and gives Stiles all the time he needs to work himself up into a proper freak out.

 

 

{ooo}

 

 

Derek nearly gets his arm cut off, and looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights for the next five hours. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so terrifying, and Stiles is sort of amazed he manages to hold his panics attack in until after he’s explained emotional shock.

 

Isaac, bless his nonexistent soul, doesn’t poke fun at him for it, either.

 

 

{ooo}

 

 

They stare at Derek for a long time, neither of them knowing quite what to say. It’s not that they don’t understand—there was Stiles’ father and there was Scott, and Isaac’s family, and a host of other loved ones besides: they know. They know.

They’ve just never had to explain it before.

 

 

“That’s...” Stiles pauses.

 

 

Swallows.

 

He hasn’t felt like that—hasn’t put himself in a position to feel like that—since he watched fog swallow Scott’s retreating back on the morning he found his father’s corpse in their kitchen, red, red walls staring him down like mourning bells.

Aside from Isaac, though, no one’s saved Stiles’ ass more than Derek has since that whole Leviathan debacle began, so he does kind of owe Derek, just a little.

 

He braces himself—allows old aches to flare into straight up pain for a moment—and doesn’t look at the way Derek crouches over the other Angel’s broken body.

 

 

“That’s sadness,” he manages around the memories lodged in his throat, “emotional pain.”

“Why do I have water in my eyes?”

 

 

Derek’s voice is steady, poised, like it’s not quite sure what to do, but it doesn’t make anything easier, and Stiles is relieved when it’s Isaac who mumbles:

 

 

“It’s tears. When you’re sad, you cry.”

 

 

He’s fiddling with the industrial chainsaw by his side, pressing on the teeth of it until a trickle of almost-black runs down the blade. He’ll have to feed soon. Before dawn, ideally.

They need to move, but Stiles doesn’t say it.

 

On the ground, Derek cradles Laura’s body, the familiar, human lines of pain etched on his face so deep it makes Stiles wonder if it’ll ever go away again. Did he look like that, too, when his mother died? Is that just the way people look when they discover death can touch them or those they care about?

Angels aren’t supposed to cry but here Derek is, hunched around the sister he loved best, the one who died so he wouldn’t be dragged back into a war he wants nothing to do with, cheeks shining with moisture even as he says:

 

 

“You never cry.”

“Haven’t since I turned,” Isaac says with a small shrug. “Corpses don’t cry.”

 

 

Derek’s face turns from Isaac to Stiles and he shrugs.

 

 

“Practice,” he says, resisting the urge to take his hands off the banister he’s leaning on to cross them over his chest instead. “You learn how to hide them.”

 

Derek doesn’t look like he gets it, which Stiles can sort of forgive him for. It’s not like it makes a lot of sense, if you take human things like pride and masculinity and stubbornness out of the equation. It still hurts though, mostly because Stiles sort of wishes he—they—didn’t have to go through this at all.

He sighs, fingers clenching around the metal, and then he follows Isaac’s lead: walks up to Derek to put a hand on his shoulder and squeeze—brief, soft, easy to dismiss if needed.

 

For a second, it almost looks like Derek is going to ask—like Stiles and Isaac are going to have to explain themselves, explain why they know it’s not enough, why they don’t do more.

 

It seems Derek managed to gain something, though, in this endless string of loss, because when he looks up there’s no question mark hovering on his face, just a quiet frown over red-rimmed eyes, and the faint hint of a smile.

 

It’s still not fair by any stretch of the imagination, but the life of a Hunter—whether they’re a human, a vampire, or an angel catching a bad case of humanity—is never fair, so Stiles takes what he can get, and he smiles back.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and reviews make me want to keep writing :)


End file.
